Kate Park makes these fantastic knitted Morrissey dolls. Sad thing is, since Kate’s work has blown up on the Internet, she simply can’t fill all the orders she’s been getting. That’s a good problem to have for a small business that makes knitted Morrissey dolls, right?

If you’d like to contact Kate about her tiny open-shirt Mozzer, here’s how:

Enquiries are still arriving and I’m thinking that at this rate, I might do a mailing list next year, so if you’d like to be on that (should it happen) and get emailed when a new doll goes on sale, please email knittedmoz@gmail.com to leave your details.

Please, please, please let me get what I want!

Yesterday on his website Morrissey listed his reasons for declining to deliver Channel 4’s rival programming for Her Majesty’s annual televised Christmas Day message on BBC. The singer, well known for despising the monarchy, said that he was sympathetic of the Queen’s right to address the country, adding that she’s irrelevant anyways, so why bother?

“My view that the monarchy should be quietly dismantled for the good of England is reasonably well-known, but I don’t think Christmas Day is quite the time to be trading slaps. The Queen should be allowed the impassioned trance of her annual address to the British people, if only to once again prove that, in her frozen posture, she has nothing to offer and nothing to say, and she has no place in modern Britain except as a figure of repression; no independent thought required. The Queen very well might be the most powerful woman in England, but she lacks the power to make herself loved, and the phony inflation of her family attacks all rational intellect.

All over the world highly civilized peoples exist without the automatic condescension of a ‘royal’ family. England can do the same, and will find more respect for doing so.”

I can hardly think of a better format for a Morrissey interview than this: in 1985, MTV’s monthly weirdomusic program IRS Records Presents the Cutting Edge put him in a room alone with a camera and a pile of envelopes each containing a one-word topic, like “fashion,” “money,” “music,” and so forth. The Smiths’ vocalist simply opened the envelopes and expounded the topics given therein (and it’s a goddamn shame none of those envelopes contained the names of any bands he disliked). The results are, unsurprisingly, classic Morrissey. Would it surprise you to learn that he thinks every art form he can name is a dying art, and that the greatest art form is the one he happens to be known for? Of course it wouldn’t.

Allowing that this was probably sourced from someone’s VHS dub of the broadcast, it looks like even by 1985 standards that that was kind of a shit video camera in there with him—the whole thing has the hazy and noisy feel of old surveillance footage. The entire video was broken up into several segments and spread out through the broadcast, but what’s here just contains the edited-out Morrissey segments. Bafflingly, the beginning is labeled “Part 2,” and there’s a lot of needless overlap between the two parts. I’ve set it up to play here in the proper order without the loads of overlap. The alternative was to post a ghastly looking and sounding screen-shot video.

In an interview earlier this month with El País, the largest newspaper in circulation in Spain, Morrissey unleashed his thoughts on bullfighting, his musical peers, his tenth studio record World Peace is None of Your Business, and compared the British royal family to the brood of Syrian President, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. In other words, Morrissey is still behaving just like Morrissey.

Since I ran the interview through Google’s translator so I could read it in English, it ended up a bit rough. However this only made the interview all the more amusing. It starts off with journalist Diego A. Manrique (whose own translated Wikipedia bio says he’s been “specializing in criticizing music since 1975”) noting that after sending off a “questionnaire” to Moz, the answers that were returned to him were unequivocally “Morrisseynianas,” and could without a doubt be attributed to him as they were filled with “acute malevolence” and Morrissey’s “recognizable narcissism.” It also states that Morrissey always comes to interviews with “loaded guns.” Here’s a few highlights from Google’s translated version of the interview:

Morrissey on bullfighting:

Bullfighters are vermin: they should kill each other.

There’s a track on World Peace titled “The Bullfighter Dies.” Remember, Moz is giving this interview to the largest newspaper in Spain where bullfighting continues to be an important part of Spanish culture. But just like Sweet Brown and her bronchitis, Morrissey just ain’t got time for that.

On the autobiographies of his peers (again, the text is translated by Google and I haven’t adjusted it):

I’m surprised that so many colleagues who actually think they have something to say! When you read his books, it does not. My Autobiography exists, is self-explanatory. So I will not talk about the book on television, radio or newspapers.

Translation aside, this is pretty much classic Moz refusing to answer a question while using many words to communicate said refusal.

On parting ways with his former label, Harvest Records:

I was not me, kicked me! They tried to keep my record but found that they had no rights. A very stupid mess, caused by an officer named Steve Barnett, who has less brains than an artificial flower. The fact that someone like that carry a label is a sign of how bad things are in the musical world.

You may remember that at a gig in Lisbon on October 7th, Moz’s band all wore “Fuck Harvest” t-shirts in protest of Morrissey’s claims that the label had “dropped” him and “botched” the release of World Peace. Despite this, the record ended up in the number two spot on the UK charts back in July following its release proving the fact that nobody kicks Morrissey, Morrissey kicks YOU!

On the upcoming apocalypse and the never-ending ecological destruction of the world:

Industrial agriculture and factory farming are destroying the planet. Every time I see the yellow M of McDonald’s think about death. Governments tolerate whatever brings money; benefit from the inclination of the human race by suicide. It amuses me that there are countries where the suicide attempt is punished while governments spend billions on nuclear weapons, which facilitate collective suicide. Just to be used once to disappear all here.

And there you have it. Morrissey translated by Google from Spanish to English is just as morose and as acutely malevolent as he ever was. God save the Queen.

Morrissey has told El Mundo newspaper via the Morrissey-Solo message board that he has received treatment for cancer. In response to the questions, “Your fans are worried about your state of health, in recent months you have been hospitalized and have had to cancel several concerts. How are you feeling?” the 55-year-old singer wrote:

They have scraped cancerous tissues from me four times already, but who cares. If I die, then I die. And if not, then I don’t. Right now I feel good. I am aware that in recent photos I look unwell, but that is what illness does. I’m not going to worry about that, I’ll rest when I’m dead.

Over the past year, Morrissey has been troubled with health issues and has been repeatedly hospitalized. Early last year, he was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer, then in March of the same year he had double pneumonia. This was followed by respiratory failure in June and food poisoning in July 2013.

In the interview Morrissey also discussed why he supported an independent Scotland (“because I like people to rise up against regimes”) and his dislike for David and Victoria Beckham:

I can not stand David and Victoria Beckham. The tragic importance that the British media give this couple is what has made us a nation of zombies. They are nothing, but their egos are abnormally overdeveloped. Victoria never does anything, but she’s always busy, absorbed in her self-worship, like “McDonna” [author’s note: for Madonna, probably]. And her husband, well, he does not know how to speak English and his business is disgusting. He has a line of perfumes that have been previously tested on animals, as if animals are accustomed to wear cologne. Remember: if you buy his aftershave lotion you are supporting animal torture.

Waaaaaaay back in 1999, Oakland, CA based artist and author Brian Brooks, who played a role in the creation of Emily The Strange, made a series of photocopied Rock ’n’ Roll coloring books, including the utterly classic Morrissey Gets a Job, an amusing speculative look at a possible post-Smiths life that could-have-been. Actually, the singer’s famously dreary disposition could make for a decent fit with the corporate office milieu. Think about it, Moz, there’s room to move in middle-management.

Even if you’ve never seen these, they might look somewhat familiar if you spent any time at all on the internet during the ‘oughts—the panels are detourned from Ready-to-Use Office and Business Illustrations, the same book of Tom Tierney clip-art that David Rees would famously pillage a couple of years later for Get Your War On.

On the most recent episode of his podcast, veteran standup and former Simpsons writer Dana Gould explored what is and isn’t mentionable in comedy—the title of the episode is “You Can’t Say That!” In the service of making a different point, Gould happened to play a clip (about 10 minutes in) from his 1998 album Funhouse, a clip that has the most spot-on, deadly accurate impression of Morrissey I’ve ever heard.

Through sheer imaginative brio, Gould, who hails from Massachusetts, manages to nail the exaggeratedly maudlin quality of Moz’s lyrics, his affectation of turning the last word of every other line into a four-syllable affair, his achy-breaky way of singing every word in a different register…. all, of course, by showcasing content that would be very unlikely to make it into a Morrissey song: the saga of a one-night stand with a circus clown. Brutality can do wonders in comedy, which explains the song’s title (and chorus): “Clown Fucker.”

Here are the lyrics, but you have to hear Gould’s version to get anything like the full effect:

He awoke in the morning and to no surprise
The man of last night had fled
Stains of white greasepaint on her body that ran
From her toes to the top of her head

The alarm stung her ear, she rolled over to spy
Much to her chagrin and her dread
A crumpled red nose and two oversized shoes
Strewn by the side of the bed

chorus
“Clown fucker! Clown fucker!” That’s what they said
“Clown fucker! Clown fucker!” That’s what they said
“No, never fuck a clown, dear,” that’s what mommy said
“Never, never fuck a clown, dear,” that’s what mommy said

She went to the bar and she started to drink
She drank and she drank and got drunk
She walked up to him and said, “How could you leave?”
But all he could do was honk

She knew it was over, it sunk in just then
It was time to say “it’s the end”
He walked out the door and stepped into a car
With forty-eight of his friends….

Born May 22, 1959, Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey turns 55 today. You may have heard of his old band, The Smiths.

To commemorate, we offer this footage of his first solo gig, in 1988 at Wolverhampton Civic Hall, which also kinda doubled as The Smiths’ farewell. The rhythm section here is a pre-lawsuit Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, and the guitarist is Craig Gannon, who served the Smiths as bassist during Rourke’s brief 1986 ouster from the band, and became their touring rhythm guitarist thereafter. As The Smiths split up before the release of their final album, Strangeways, Here We Come, this was the only live performance of some of that material ever undertaken by this many Smiths at once.

Admission was free to anyone wearing a Smiths or Morrissey shirt. Only half the fans who traveled to Wolverhampton made it inside the venue. Outside the queuing and organisation almost turned to chaos. The atmosphere inside was obviously very charged. There was a great deal of cheering and chanting Morrissey’s name to the English football tune. Throughout the short set many fans made it on stage, much more than for a typical Smiths concert.

Morrissey came on stage to a thunder of applause, after a long period of cheering and chanting. In the first song, “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before”, he sang “And so I drank one, or was it four?” instead of “... it became four”. He actually sang that line as it had been originally written and not as it appeared on “Strangeways Here We Come”. Before “Interesting Drug” which had yet to be released and was unknown to the fans, Morrissey started “This song is called…” but never managed to finish his introduction. In that song just like in the previous one, “Disappointed”, Morrissey missed many lines because of the mayhem with the fans on stage.

It’s true—Morrissey gets manhandled worse than Dead Kennedys-era Jello Biafra here. Having touched the garment of their messiah, I’m sure most of those kids turned out OK.

Fans mobbed singer Morrissey last night during his gig at the City National Civic, in San Jose. Morrissey was in the middle of his second encore singing “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell,” which obviously proved to be too much for some fans who jumped onstage to give the singer a farewell hug.

Hugging may have been okay, but according to the OC Weekly, some fans “tackled” Morrissey and there were “a couple creepy attempts by fans to mount him like a steed”. Say what? Then things really got further out of hand as:

...someone broke through and took Moz to the ground, causing the band to stop playing as boos roared through the crowd. What a way to start the U.S. tour! Moz’ new album, World Peace is None of Your Business, is slated for release in July. Hopefully he’s okay, but as of now, there’s no official word on his physical condition.

Fans now wait to see if Morrissey will play his show tonight at The Observatory in Santa Ana, otherwise there will be a lot of people miserable now.

If you’re not able to see Morrissey on his current tour (details here), you may be interested to hear of plans to make a movie about Morrissey’s pre-Smiths days. Honlodge, a production company based in Manchester, England, are in development with a script written by director Mark Gill and William Thacker. The movie is currently under the working title “Steven Morrissey” and according to Gill:

“The film covers Morrissey’s life pre-Smiths and is more of a portrait than a conventional biopic.

“It’s as much a film for non-Morrissey fans as it is for die-hard devotees, but I can’t deny that this is a love letter to Steven Patrick Morrissey and the dark satanic mills of Manchester.”

Filming is scheduled to start at the end of this year. More details here.

Tony Wilson was a multi-media Renaissance man, a co-founder of Factory Records, a TV reporter, journalist and host, and the man who helped make Manchester a city of cultural and musical importance during the seventies, eighties and nineties with such bands as Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column and Happy Mondays. Wilson may have been Manchester’s “Mr. Music” but he was also known as the man who didn’t sign The Smiths.

Like all tales of regret and lost opportunity, there are multiple versions as to why Wilson didn’t sign “the ultimate Indie band,” and this is the one he gave to Ian Watson in 2003:

Watson: Did you ever try and sign The Smiths?

Wilson: “No. I was very close to The Smiths. I was very close to Morrissey. Morrissey was part of that little punk scene until 77 and there was a social whirl around a house called 35 Mayfield Road where Steven partially lived and where Linder lived, who was Howard Devoto’s girlfriend and also still today is Morrissey’s best friend. But I treated Steven, he was our genius writer. He was the speccy kid in the corner, the clever little swotty outsider boy, and very brilliant. My first contact with him was when he sent me as a schoolboy, a battered New York Dolls album sleeve and said ‘Dear Mr Wilson, why can’t there be more bands on television like this?’ so I knew him and I actually was encouraging his writing. He wrote a fantastic short play about eating toast and I think he gave it to me and I lost it.

“Then, at some point, whenever it was in 1980, he phoned me up and said would you come and see me. I drove out to King’s Road, Stretford, to his mum’s house, went to his bedroom upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed while he sat on the chair, surrounded by James Dean posters and he informed me that he’d decided to become a pop star. I sort of went ‘well Steven that’s very interesting’, and inside I was thinking ‘you must be fucking joking’. The least likely, you’re off your fucking head. Completely in my mind, absolutely, the least likely rock n roll star imaginable in the universe.

“So then obviously we were all part of a group of mutual friends and I can remember saying this same thing to Richard Boon, my mate who manages the Buzzcocks, and about four or five months later the two of us went to a gig in the Manhattan Club in Manchester. I think it was probably the Smiths’ first or second gig and as we walked out, I was blown away, it was fantastic, and he said ‘what do you think?’, and I said ‘I take it back completely, he’s amazing’.

“However, at that point in time Factory had gone through its wonder days of 78, 79 and we were now in late 1980 and into early 81. This is pre ‘Blue Monday’. We weren’t selling records, we were useless, we’d lost our plot and I was very depressed by the company. I had a band called Stockholm Monsters, I couldn’t sell Stockholm Monsters records and I thought fine and my honest approach was, I’m not going to saddle Steven with this pile of shit, with Factory when it’s shit. So I didn’t even pursue it. I said to him ‘I wouldn’t be any use to you’.

“That was my version of why I didn’t sign the Smiths. I know the Smiths have their version. Everyone has.”

Morrissey is not the kind of man to let a grievance go untended, and in his autobiography he relates how The Smiths had revenge on Wilson in 1986, when he asked the band to play on the bill of “Festival of the Tenth Summer” at the G-Mex in Manchester. This was a music festival to celebrate Manchester ten years after The Sex Pistols had played the city’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976. Having originally said “no” to playing the festival as the ticket prices were too high, Morrissey was swayed by a letter from Wilson urging The Smiths to take part, which they did.

In fact, the G-Mex event is a great day, and theatrician Wilson is at his best master of ceremonies scarf-flowing staginess. He calls everyone ‘dahling’, but it’s all a part of the public relations aspect of his showboat routine and not at all disingenuous. Before the Smiths go onstage, film-maker Derek Jarman is brought into the dressing room and is introduced. Johnny says ‘Hello,’ and then turns sideways to vomit. It is certainly a moment, but unfortunately it wasn’t caught on film.

Onstage, the Smiths are received as a life-giving source, and this begins to enrage Wilson so much that he flutters and fumes backstage, demanding to technicians that the Smiths’ power to be cut off. No backline crew will comply with Wilson, who is effectively gagged at his own festival. At the base of it all, general opinion assessed Wilson’s rage to be the blustering fury in realizing that the Smiths had meant more to the crowd than his nurtured proteges New Order. Suddenly Wilson’s divine right to be Mr. Manchester is scuppered, and he spends the remainder of his life with a Morrissey-Smiths wasting disease of the lower limbs, whilst oddly admitting that his big mistake in life was that he didn’t sign the Smiths to Factory.

Yes, well, there we go.

Back in the knife drawer, Miss Sharp.

Of course, history is always written by those who outlive their rivals, and Wilson sadly died in 2007, so we won’t hear his account of this supposed “blustering fury,” but so it goes.

Long before this, Wilson promoted as many bands as he was able through his show So It Goes and innumerable insert reports on Manchester’s evening news program. This then is Mr. Wilson dropping in on The Smiths as they rehearsed for a tour in 1985, during the week their second album Meat Is Murder went straight to number one in the UK album charts, and the band was voted “Group of the Year” in an NME poll. Wilson interviews drum & bass players Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, before strumming a few questions with Johnny Marr, and then there’s a minor clash of egos with Morrissey, when Wilson asks him why he ever wanted to become a pop star in the first place?

The individual components to this TV show promised more than was delivered. The fact Phil Lynott and Morrissey were part of the two teams taking part in this Pop Quiz, would whet any appetite, but sadly the result is as bland and anodyne as the show’s host, Mike Read.

While treating his listeners to a performance of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s thumping dance single “Relax,” Read idly scanned the record sleeve and began to read the lyrics to the song, which had been steadily climbing the charts.

Then, mid-broadcast, he lifted the needle, denounced the content as “obscene” and refused to play it again. The rest of the BBC followed suit, banning the song, with its veiled reference to gay sex, from all TV and radio airplay, with the curious exception of the top 40 show.

Within a fortnight the song had rocketed to number one, where it nested for four weeks. (As if to rub the Beeb’s nose in it, a few months later “Relax” returned to the charts, reaching number two.)

“Relax” eventually reached Number One on 24th January, 1984, and was the beginning of an incredibly successful year for Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The ban made the BBC and especially Read look prissy, out-of-touch and utterly ridiculous. With this in mind, one has to question why the Beeb thought Mike Read a suitable host for their Saturday tea-time entertainment show Pop Quiz? As anything the poor man touched was automatically rendered vapid, bland and unrelentingly dull.

Poor Phil Lynott, who looks here like a doorman for some low-rent strip club, tries his best to jolly things along, but is given little to no help by his fellow team members, some hairdressing experiment from Kajagoogoo, and a dull Derek Forbes from Simple Minds.

Morrissey, meanwhile, is teamed-up with aging glam rocker, Alvin Stardust (yes, the fellow who crooned “My Coo Ca Choo”) and Kim Wilde of “Kids in America” (Whoa!) fame. At first Morrissey looks almost keen (answering his early questions correctly) before the full horror of the show dawns on him. As he later told The Face magazine:

“Pop Quiz was unbearable. I realized it was a terrible mistake the moment the cameras began to roll. … I just squirmed through the programme. I went back to my dressing room afterwards and virtually felt like breaking down, it had been so pointless. I felt I’d been gagged.”

I’m not sure Morrissey was gagged, but it is fair to say both he and Lynott were certainly under some sort of neutralizing presence that seems to emanate from Mr. Read. The only colorful thing about him is his tasteless shirt that looks like something Walt Disney puked up.

Now you know what made for popular television in Britain back in 1984.

Big Mouth’s autobiography is published tomorrow by (can you believe it?) Penguin Classics. This even before a word of it has been read or considered worthy of inclusion amongst such writers as Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch, Jane Austen, Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens, etc, etc. Admittedly Penguin Classics also include Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Carson McCullers and Ross McDonald—but at least these authors had already been published, and earned their place to be included in the list by being “read by generation after generation.” I wonder if Morrissey’s Autobiography will be read by anyone ten years from now, let alone a hundred?

The Guardian newspaper recently asked readers to send in their alternative designs for the cover to Morrissey’s Autobiography, here are a selection of their favorites. View more here.

The recent Internet rumor that Morrissey: Autobiography was no longer to be published by Penguin Books (allegedly due to a “content disagreement”) has been finally quashed by the publishers, who claim the eagerly anticipated memoir will be published in the coming weeks. This has also been confirmed by the Morrissey fan site, True To You, which posted the following:

“The publication of Morrissey’s Autobiography remains with Penguin Books. This is a deal for the UK and Europe, but Morrissey has no contract with a publisher for the US or any other territory. As of 13 September, Morrissey and Penguin (UK) remain determined to publish within the next few weeks.”

So, it looks like American Morrissey fans may have to wait for a US publisher to pick up the rights. With the interest shown in this memoir, that shouldn’t take long.

Meanwhile, the former Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr, who released his debut solo album, The Messenger, in February of this year to overwhelmingly positive reviews, has been telling the press what he likes in music:

“...short, sharp, snappy songs with glamorous, sexy guitars and lyrics that sound like poetry that moves at the speed of light – that’s what rock or pop music should be about and it should come alive on the stage. Bands you can see and come away knowing they’ve put a lot into it. A lot of bands I saw when I was younger gave me that feeling of really wanting to be there. You feel like you’re having a unique experience with the band and they’re having a unique experience with you.

You’ll find a damn fine selection of short, sharp, snappy Smiths’ songs (all dressed up with poetry and guitars) on this classic edition of Rockpalast, from 1984. You’ll also note that the band repeat three of the set list as an encore—obviously they didn’t have enough songs back then—finishing on “Barbarism Begins At Home” which would feature on their 1985 album Meat is Murder.

It’s difficult to make sense of the news today that Penguin Books in the UK have dropped the publication of Morrissey’s Autobiography, which was supposed to be available for sale next Monday, but, hey, it’s easy to speculate…

Penguin claim that no review copies were printed, which seems quite odd to me as a former publisher, because lead times for magazines tend to be 90 days and the pre-retail marketing period leading up to a big book’s street date can take from six to nine months.

It’s being reported that “a last-minute content disagreement between Penguin Books and Morrissey has caused the venture to collapse.”

If it was “last minute,” there WOULD obviously have not only been review copies printed up, they’d have had tens of thousands of finished copies on hand for Monday, too.

Maybe it wasn’t so last minute, after all, but what’s the reason for it? When there’s a lot of money at stake, as there would be with something like this, usually the publisher will bend over backwards to accommodate a famous author.

Morrissey’s autobiography? That would sell like hotcakes the world over.

There has to be something hot in it. Morrissey has a long history of making controversial statements. I wonder what’s in it that caused Penguin to drop it? None of the reports mention WHY it was dropped. That’s got to be the interesting part…

Anyone got a digital copy?

UPDATE: The whole thing is an Internet hoax. It seems to have started on a Morrissey fan site and then got picked up at MOJO and Pitchfork. It seemed fishy with no Amazon listing. You can read more about this at The Atlantic Wire.

In happier news for Mozz fans, his new concert DVD, Morrissey 25: Live From Hollywood High shot at back in March, will be released on October 22. Here’s the trailer: